/e/ has drastically worse privacy and security from the Android Open Source Project or especially and iPhone. It's not a step up from standard AOSP. It lags many months behind on many High/Critical severity patches, years behind on overall patches and rolls back the privacy/security in a bunch of ways. It includes many invasive services.

It has many default enabled highly privileged Google services including downloading Google Play executables such as droidguard and running those with similar privileged access as they have on a Google Mobile Services OS anyway.